Black and grey realism tattoo of a rose breaking out of a coin with a torn edge, shown on a limb, with the word ONE on the coin.

Realistic rose within a coin design

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic rose sits at the centre of a coin-like design, with its petals appearing to break through a cracked or torn surface. The shading is smooth and heavily contrasted, with deep blacks and soft greys that give the petals and metal rim depth. The tattoo fills most of the frame on a limb, and the coin's rim carries a partly visible word.

Realism Other Rose Coin Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad had the cupboard door off its hinges by the time Aunt Pru caught him at it, a screwdriver in one fist and a tea towel in the other. "It's only a coin, Ray," she said. "It's been in that shoe since 1961."

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The coin had gone into my mother's left shoe on the morning of her wedding, the way it did for luck, and nobody had thought about it again until the house was being cleared. Its face had worn thin as a fingernail, but someone, years back, had pressed a rose into the cracked metal with a nail file, or so Pru claimed, and the petals had pushed out through the torn rim as if they wanted to see the room.

We sat on the stairs and passed it between us under the landing light. Pru read the rim aloud, the letters half gone: ONE, or maybe ONCE. Dad said the word didn't matter. He turned the coin over, found the date, and started to cry, which was not something I had seen him do in twenty years.

In the end we took it to the registry office, where the woman behind the glass said it was worth about four pounds to the right collector. Dad asked her to keep it anyway. He said he'd rather it stayed in the shoe it came from.